


burning in paradise

by orphan_account



Series: maybe i don't want heaven [2]
Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Brother/Sister Incest, But there's a scene that's definitely an allusion to sex, F/M, Incest, Mild Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Sibling Incest, They don't actually do anything sexual in nature
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-02
Updated: 2016-08-02
Packaged: 2018-07-28 22:48:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7659937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Prayed all the prayers that I could pray; not even god could give me this feeling." — No Fear, Greyson Chance</p><p>Touka and Ayato have always been close, but the older they get, the more they wonder if maybe they're a little bit <em>too</em> close. But they can only straddle the line between appropriate and taboo for so long before something tips the scales, and it becomes a question of how far can they go before they can't take it back.</p><p>(Alternatively, the two times Touka and Ayato almost crossed the line, and the one time they definitely did.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	burning in paradise

**Author's Note:**

> AU where Touka and Ayato never joined Anteiku and continued their street life.
> 
> Just in case you somehow missed the tags, this is definitely stepping out of vague/ambiguous territory. I still stand by my previous statement of their relationship not necessarily being romantic, but it most assuredly cannot be considered purely familial in this piece.

Even though he’s the younger sibling, Ayato has grown to become the stronger of the two of them. So when he slumps over, with barely enough strength to hold himself up, Touka knows that they’re in trouble.

The odds are against them –– the odds are _always_ against them, the cynic in Touka reminds her, but she’ll save her bitterness for another time; perhaps when she and Ayato aren’t at imminent risk of being killed. There’s still some fight left in her yet, but even someone with as much pride as her knows that she cannot win.

Not when she’s hurt too, not when she’s outnumbered, not when fighting means taking her attention off Ayato.

So she does the next best thing –– she picks Ayato up and she _runs_.

She’s a lot faster than those humans, and it’s not hard to lose them, but even as the distance between them and the doves grows, the gnawing worry in her chest doesn’t ease. Ayato’s out cold now, having fallen limp against her the moment she’d wrapped her arms around him.

Her fingers curl into his side a little harder, and she tries not to think about the wetness seeping through his shirt. There’s a low whine from him when her nails dig into his flesh, and even though there’s a spike of guilt for having caused him more pain – no matter how insignificant – she’s relieved enough to hear the sound of his voice that she laughs.

She has to pause on a rooftop because she’s laughing so hard that her body shakes with it. The gravity of their situation finally hits her, and she sinks to her knees, letting Ayato fall onto her lap as she cradles him to her. There’s an edge of hysteria to her laughter, and she buries her face in Ayato’s hair in an attempt to muffle the sound, but all it does is make her cry instead.

They’re holed up in an abandoned apartment when Ayato finally comes to, and it takes Touka all of two seconds to cross the threshold to kneel by his side, palming his face, his shoulders, his body to make sure that he’s nicely healed up. Ayato chases her hands with his own, bringing them back up to his face and pressing them against his own cheeks.

“I’m okay,” he breathes, and they’re so close that the whisper glides over her skin, leaving tingles in their wake.

She leans in––

––and tugs his head down at the last moment so that her lips land firmly on his forehead.

When she pulls away, she thinks she sees a shadow of disappointment in his eyes. She doesn’t comment on it, because she knows her own expression is a reflection of his. Ayato says nothing either.

 

* * *

 

“Are you sure about this?” Ayato asks, and Touka thinks she might have made fun of the little crease that’s appeared between his eyebrows if she wasn’t so terrified.

She swallows the truth, and nods her head. “Yeah,” she says, sounding much braver than she actually feels. She’s asking so much of Ayato already; she can’t burden him with her fears on top of it. 

He cups her face then, and she’s struck by how big his hands are. He’s taller too, broader around the shoulders, the softness of his child’s body replaced by sharp planes of muscle.

“I’m sorry.” The words slip out before she can stop them. “I know you don’t want to do this.”

“You’re right, I don’t,” he admits, and Touka can’t help but wince. She _knows_ how he feels, but hearing him confirm it makes her feel even worse for putting him in that position in the first place. “But I don’t want it to be anyone else but me either.”

“I don’t trust anyone else when it comes to you.”

Touka knows it’s not healthy, Ayato’s fixation on being the only person she turns to, but she’d be a hypocrite if she were to ever tell him to let her lean on other people for a change. Because as much as she knows it’s wrong, she also knows how he feels, because she feels the same.

Besides, it’s not like she wants anybody but Ayato to take care of her. 

So maybe their relationship is a little fucked up, she’ll admit, but there’s really nothing about their lives that _isn’t_ fucked up. And Ayato is the only spot of happiness in her life, so she really doesn’t give a fuck what other people make of them. Ayato presses his forehead against hers, and they stand like that for a few heartbeats, just breathing each other in.

This time they’re in a half-demolished apartment complex, having made a bed out of some old blankets laid down on the bare concrete. When Ayato pulls away, he gently nudges Touka towards the blankets. Wordlessly, she walks over, pausing only for a second to tug her shirt off before lying down, cheek pressed against the musty fabric. She feels Ayato straddle her lower back, knees on either side of her hips and hands gripping her waist.

Touka exhales slowly, and then unleashes her kagune (slowly, because the last thing she wants is to hurt Ayato). Immediately, she feels his hands on it, moving carefully, methodically, until the tension in her shoulders eases. She can’t help the shudder that works its way down her spine when he presses his lips against her wing, and maybe the way her eyes flutter shut at his ministrations is wrong, but Ayato’s mouth feels like heaven and _god_ the way his hands move across her back feels so incredibly good too.

She gasps, twisting the blankets in her fists when he bites into her flesh. It _hurts_ , but she’s surprised at the fact that pain isn’t the only sensation she’s feeling. It burns as he tears off chunks of her kagune with his teeth, but it also burns a different way where his fingers rub circles onto her skin. As he wears it down close to the bone, as his lips brush against the skin of her shoulder blades, he reaches for her hand. Ayato’s almost lying completely on top of her now, and she lets go of the blankets to clasp his hand, their fingers intertwining without thought.

It takes her a while to get her breathing back to normal, and a little more to realise that Ayato’s stopped moving. “Ayato?” she breathes, rubbing a thumb across his knuckles.

He doesn’t reply, but he does bury his face in her hair, his nose pressed against the little junction where her neck slopes into her shoulder. Touka wants to turn around, wants to see her baby brother, wants to push his hair out of his eyes and tell him that she’s okay and she’s sorry she asked him to do this and she loves him, so, so much.

When Ayato finally gets up and leaves, Touka doesn’t follow. She sits up and watches him go, pretending that she doesn’t still feel the ghost of his touch on her skin. She’s not sure if the gentle brush of his lips over the nape of her neck had been intentional, but she knows he’ll never tell her and she’ll never ask.

 

* * *

 

On the days when the loss of her parents stings less, Touka will admit that there are perks to being street orphans. She remembers being soft and kind and gentle once upon a time, eager to learn and compliant. Now she’s only soft for Ayato. Now she revels in her freedom, in not having anyone to tell her what to do.

So when Ayato suggests breaking into the swimming complex, there’s approval in the wicked curve of her lips. It’s been a while since the last time they’ve done this, and it’s apparent when Touka strips off her clothes. She’s still petite, but Ayato sees even the slightest curves that he knows weren’t there the last time they went for a midnight swim.

But even as he maps the new changes, he doesn’t leer. He knows that most of the world would label the love he feels for his sister wrong, or _impure_ , and he doesn’t want to prove them right. He loves her more than he should, yes, and he loves her in ways a brother probably shouldn’t love his sister, but he refuses to let his feelings for her be reduced to carnal desires.

He dives into the water, laughing when Touka calls him a show off. He beckons for her to join him, and she does, slicing cleanly into the water and surfacing right in front of him. “I think that’s a solid 8.5,” he teases, closing his eyes for the inevitable splash to come, because he knows Touka.

So when he feels the water crash into his face, he only laughs harder. “Fuck off,” Touka retorts, even though when he opens his eyes again the first thing he sees is her grin, “That was at least a 9.”

He goes quiet, pretends to think, before splashing at her and then swimming away. It doesn’t take long for him to feel a hand grab his leg, and then suddenly she’s wrapped herself around him completely, weighing him down enough to make him stop and try to shake her off.

They play like that for a while, chasing each other around the pool, occasionally climbing onto each other to hitch a ride. By the time the climb out of the pool, they’re out of breath, both from the swimming and from laughing so hard. They’re dripping water everywhere, and when Touka slips on the wet tiles, she and Ayato reach for each other at the same time and they end up collapsing into a tangle of limbs by the side of the pool.

“Sorry,” Touka says, but she’s laughing too hard to sound anything close to sincere. She extracts herself from his arms when her laughter finally fades to soft giggles, lying on her side next to him, elbow propped against the floor and chin in her palm.

Ayato mimics her posture, also lying on his side so that they’re face to face. His hair falls onto his face, and Touka’s touch is gentle when she brushes her fingertips across his forehead, pushing his hair away from his eyes. He expects her to pull away, but she doesn’t. Her hand hovers over his face, and he reaches for it, bringing it down to his lips to press a kiss against her palm.

And then he leans forward, slotting their lips together –– it’s quick, and it barely counts as a kiss, but Ayato feels electricity thrum in his veins anyway. When he pulls back, he expects Touka to brush it off, as they always do whenever they toe the line of appropriate actions between siblings.

He doesn’t expect her to pull her hand out of his grasp, doesn’t expect her hand to snake to the back of his neck to keep him from moving too far away, doesn’t expect her to close the distance between them once more. But that’s exactly what she does, and she keeps their lips joined longer than he did, long enough for him to tentatively return the kiss. It’s his first kiss, and he reckons it’s her first as well; they move slowly, carefully, exploring this new facet of their relationship with tenderness.

It’s only when they separate that the weight of their actions settles between them, and the silence is thick with unsaid words. “Are we going to pretend this never happened?” Ayato asks when he finally dares to speak. The magic of the moment still lingers, but reality’s starting to seep in.

Touka’s quiet still, and even though they’re still kind of leaning towards each other on their sides awkwardly, Ayato doesn’t dare to move for fear of startling Touka into running from him. The silence stretches out, and Touka sits up. Ayato starts to get up too, but she places a hand on his chest, gently easing him to lie down on his back. He’s not sure where she’s going with this, but he doesn’t protest, letting her push him onto the floor while she remains sitting.

“Do you want to pretend this never happened?” she finally speaks up, throwing his question back at him.

“No,” he replies almost immediately, and maybe he should be ashamed of how quickly the word leaves his mouth but he sees the corner of Touka’s mouth twitch and he thinks he can live with being embarrassingly needy if it amuses her.

She cups his face, leaning down to connect their mouths again. “We’re going to hell,” she remarks, her lips brushing against his with every word she breathes.

Ayato’s hands find her face, and he pushes her away just enough for him to look her in the eyes. “At least we’ll be together,” he says. He’s being serious, so Touka knows that she really shouldn’t laugh, but the sentiment is so ridiculously sweet and she is so warm on the inside that the happiness just spills out in the form of laughter.

He doesn’t take offence to that though, merely rolling his eyes at her and pushing her back a little more so that he can get up. It’s almost light out, so they dress themselves and slip out of the swimming complex before they get caught. Touka slips her hand into Ayato’s, and he feels a little bolder when no one they pass on the streets pays them any attention.

“I’ll see you in hell,” he leans over to whisper.

Touka laughs and she laughs and she laughs. 

(People finally take notice of them then, but Ayato finds that he doesn’t really care after all.)

**Author's Note:**

> Well I'm going to hell, probably.
> 
> On a more serious note, I'm not seeking to normalise or romanticise incest in any way with this series. The Kirishimas are fictional characters, and I'm exploring their relationship based on what we've been given in canon, just taken a tad further. I don't encourage real-world incest (I mean, I don't condemn it either, provided it's a healthy and consensual relationship, but that's not really the point here).


End file.
